The visit of Das Labor was excellent. They really have an eclectic set of projects, ranging from cryptography and network security to FPGA system-on-chip design. Even a chemistry lab is being talked about. They also have a good taste for LED gadgets, with things like homemade T-Shirts on which you can play Tetris with a wireless joystick.
I have played a bit with soc-lm32 that they develop and found out why the Mico32 softcore CPU it uses had poor performance – it was configured to use an asynchronous reset which does not play well with DSP48 slices and caused problems and critical paths in the multiplier. I’m now seriously thinking about switching to Mico32 in Milkymist – the AEMB processor currently in use has a few problems.